Just between you and me
I’m often asked why I’m writing in this particular parish when it doesn’t seem my most natural milieu. Here’s the truth.
I’m often asked why I’m writing in this particular parish when it doesn’t seem my most natural milieu. Here’s the truth.
I never tire of the insights the Census yields. It is a demographic dipstick into the essence of being Australian.
Offering a traumatic first memory of my own, I asked you to send me yours. The response was overwhelming.
Done simply, French fries are outrageously good to eat. So why are people all over the world doing horrible things with them?
The pandemic has thrown up some truly beautiful words that just dance off the tongue. Here’s my favourite.
Behold an assembly line for human misery as the desperately ill and dying arrive in hope of being instantly cured.
In south-west Victoria recently, a small, bright wonder: a huddled bird all the way from Antarctica. Alive, and alone.
Calling Restaurant Leo ‘Italian’ isn’t quite right. The ingredients are Italian but the very approachable food is its own, lovely thing.
Toyota is many things but it is not exciting. What, then, are we to make of the fizzing firecracker that is Toyota’s GR Yaris?
The world — including some fragile men — can’t deal with non-meek women. Historically, the ‘bad’ girls are punished. Just look at Naomi Osaka.
Decades ago, Kerry Packer paid for my columns not with a wage but with regular etchings by one of my favourite artists.
Business lunches have been much diminished by the rise of #WFH. Without the culture of trust they foster, will deal-making suffer?
‘Choking is mainstream now. And hitting….’ That bleak little nugget came from a 20-year-old friend, in a talk about consent.
This is the story of the public part of the private home — and how the ‘good room’ reinvented itself as the Zoom room.
My new novel is a historical thriller, a tale of survival in colonial Australia. Hopefully it will get the reader to think.
At the East Kew sub-branch of the Kew Municipal Library, I was handed a book that changed my life.
Old-style photo albums used to showcase family life’s best bits. Today we’re drowning in digital dross.
Some mark their memories with movies or music. I prefer dogs.
In six decades as a columnist I’ve rarely seen such a response. Hundreds of funny, bittersweet emails sharing memories of dearly departed things.
Late last year interviewed my mother on her 95th birthday. Three weeks later, she passed away.
Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/weekend-australian-magazine/columnists/page/43